My friends and I have a pretty fun multiplayer Minecraft world going, complete with a strip mine with an automated transit system and an enormous cobblestone pyramid. Everything is totally sweet...

Except the spawn area. The spawn area seems to have anti-griefing measures or something that prevent us from putting blocks there (or taking blocks out). This is an issue because Creepers have no such restrictions. Dozens of Creepers have gone to town on newly spawned players, blowing holes in the terrain and generally wreaking havoc on the spawn area. It's now covered in sand and water and is pretty much a giant pain to get out of when you respawn.

How can we fix this? Can we turn off the anti-griefing thing? Can we edit the world somehow to fix up the spawn area and make it less like a minefield?

5 Answers
5

In the standard Minecraft server, the area around the world spawn point cannot be modified by players that are not ops. To work on the spawn area, be an operator ("opyourname" at the console, "/opyourname" in chat by another operator).

You can also change the radius of the protected area in the server.properties file by adding/changing the spawn-protection field, which defaults to 16, that meaning all blocks within 16 blocks of the central column of the spawn area. For example,

spawn-protection=0

will protect only the single column of blocks at the center of the spawn area (it is not possible to eliminate the protection entirely).

For your particular problem, I would suggest not just fixing the damage but building a safe area around the spawn — that is, well-illuminated so that creepers cannot spawn, and enclosed by walls or fences so that they cannot wander in.

Having at least one op and at least one admin is almost a must. Admins have to be added manually to the server conf or added through the console and can then add ops in game.
–
MBraedleyJan 17 '11 at 2:40

8

The standard Minecraft server has no “admin” level, and any op can make another player an op. “Admin” is commonly used to refer to persons with access to the server console, but the server itself does not manage the console (it is just stdin/stdout of the server process).
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Kevin ReidJan 17 '11 at 17:36

This is perfect - I'm running the server and didn't realize ops had these special privileges.
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lilserfJan 18 '11 at 18:41

You can also copy the map to single player and edit it there
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Ronan FormanFeb 3 '11 at 22:00